How Putting in Your 10k Hours Will Find Your Niche
Everyone is curious to know if they’re truly found the right audience for their music. We put in a lot of time to perform and refine our sound. We put ourselves out there to see if it really sticks, but how do we really know if we’ve truly found our niche?
A lot of what defines our niche is a balance between our creativity and the audience that follows the music we create. If the music changes, so does the audience. How do we find our place in the market so to speak? Here are a few things to think about:
1. Where have you invested your time?
If you want to know where to invest your time, simply look at where you have already invested your time. Lets say, for example, in the last few years you might have learned how to play an instrument for one or two hours a day. Or you might have wrote songs in a certain style. Or you might have spent a lot of time on production.
Those are good signs of where you should invest your 10,000 hours. You already invest part of that 10,000 hours so you only need to invest the rest. The difference is now you do it consciously and deliberately. You will be more effective that way.
A key thing in finding your niche is putting in your 10k hours. If you want to work on a your marketing skills and songwriting skills, you’ll need to invest the same amount of time on both to reach those 10K hours. For example, if you spend 1 hour on production, and 1 hour on marketing 5 days a week, you’ll reach your 10k hours in 41.6 years. Here are some more examples:
2 hours/day x 7 days/week = 14.8 years
4 hours/day x 5 days/week = 10.4 years
(you get the point)
2. What are your passions?
10,000 hours is an astonishing amount of time. Finding the motivation to stick to one thing for that amount of time is vastly difficult. Actually, that’s the reason why 10,000 is the magic number for world-class expertise. Most people never even reach that number. Only a select few actually reach the 10,000 hours mark and that’s why they become world class.
If you’re doing something you love to do, reaching the 10,000 hours mark will be a lot easier. You’ll be able to get through the tough times, and earn some grit. It will help you overcome complacency. If you’re not doing something you love, it isn’t likely that you’ll ever reach the 10k hours mark.
3. What opportunities does the age give you?
In the book, Outliers by Malcom Gladwell, he shows that your birth date has significant influence on your success. Gladwell shows that being born in mid 1950s is great if you want to be a computer entrepreneur. In the mid 1970s when the personal computer came to fruition, you’d be in good position to hedge that market. You wouldn’t have been too old that you already had an established job with older generations of computers. Neither would you have been too young to have the necessary skills to take advantage of the opportunity.
What opportunities does your birth date give you? What opportunities do you have right now? What opportunity is currently open for you?
Answering these questions is not easy because it’s difficult to see whether or not something will be hot. When Bill Gates did his 10,000 hours of practice to learn programming, he might not know that it would eventually put him in a perfect position to be a software mogul. You need to have faith in something and believe that the dots will eventually connect. In Steve Jobs’ words:
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something ”” your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
